Every forum where shop owners gather has the same thread. Someone posts the question they have answered forty times this month, adds that the answer is on the product page, in the FAQ, and in the order confirmation email, and asks what else they are supposed to do. The replies agree: customers do not read.
They are right about the observation and wrong about the conclusion. Reading was never the thing you were asking for.
What you actually asked of them
Consider what finding your delivery cut-off requires of a customer at half past nine at night. Notice there is a help centre. Guess which of its categories the answer sits under. Open two or three articles. Skim a page written for a slightly different question. Decide whether the paragraph they found is current or from 2023.
That is a research task, and you are giving it to someone who has one question and their thumb on a phone screen. They will attempt it for about fifteen seconds. Then they will do the thing that has always worked with a human, which is to ask.
None of that is laziness. It is a fair assessment of effort. Your documentation is a filing cabinet, and it is a good one, but nobody arrives at a shop wanting to open a filing cabinet.
The failure is in the delivery
This is why the fix is rarely another rewrite of the FAQ. The page usually contains the answer. What it lacks is any way of handing that answer to the person who needs it in the shape they asked for it.
A search box helps a little. A well-organised help centre helps a little more. Neither closes the gap, because both still require the customer to translate their question into your categories. The customer asks “can I still get this by Friday”; the page is titled “Shipping and delivery information”, and it answers in a table.
What closes the gap is something that reads the filing cabinet on their behalf and replies in a sentence. That is all a doc-grounded chatbot is: your existing documentation, answering back, in the customer’s phrasing, at the moment they asked.
What this does and does not fix
It does not improve your documentation. A bot answering from a thin returns policy gives thin answers, and a bot answering from a page that was true last spring will repeat last spring’s promise with a straight face and your name on it. Delivery being broken and content being wrong are separate problems, and only one of them is solved by putting a widget on the page.
It does help you find the second problem. When a bot cannot answer, the question it could not answer is worth reading — it is the clearest map of what your documentation is missing that you will ever be handed, and it costs nothing to collect.
The customers who never read the FAQ are not a different species from the ones who do. They are the same people, in a hurry, holding a question. The documentation was always for them; it was just waiting in the wrong place, in the wrong shape, for someone patient enough to go and look.